Sally. When we think of the classics of Islamic thought today,
we think of the first instance of works written by the founders of the very schools of theology, law, philosophy,
linguistics, Sufism and historiography,
and by subsequent scholars who shaped these fields through their seminal contributions out of the bookshops around us.
Her eyebrows for hours with my visits to Cairo could be relied on to contain such works.
But this landscape of relative established classics was not what al-Hassani faced at the turn of the 20th century.
Far from ubiquitous, these works were scarce and difficult, if not impossible to find.
Not only had most not yet been edited and printed, but there were few manuscript copies of them,
and the whereabouts of those few that existed were often unknown.
Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk. The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East.
These are some of the books written by our members, members of our community, Orba and books that our community are talking about.
My name is as someone other than me and I teach contemporary Islamic studies at the Middle East centre.
My guest today is Ahmed Shamsi. He is an associate professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago.
Ahmed is no stranger to the UK.
He completed his undergraduate and master's degrees at So US and the LSC respectively, before heading west to pursue a doctorate at Harvard.
Since 2010, Ahmed has been based at the University of Chicago. His research is concerned with intellectual history of Islam,
focussing on the evolution of the class of the classical Islamic disciplines and the scholarly culture within their broader historical context.
His research addresses themes such as a reality, literacy, the history of the book,
and the theory and practise of Islamic law, and its important first book, The Canonisation of Islamic Law.
A Social and Intellectual History,
traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries.
AM its second book. The subject of today's conversation is similarly a significant contribution to our understanding of Islamic intellectual history.
It is entitled Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.
Welcome to Book Talk. Thank you for having me. It's our pleasure.
And so just to start this conversation off, I wanted wondered if you could tell us something about how you wrote your book.
When did it start? What sources were you able to uncover and what countries did the research take you to?
So part of my formation as a scholar is that I,
I like to browse bookshops in the Middle East and spend hours there just looking at the various sections and reading these books.
And for me, they represented something off of a tradition that you could just access and buy and take home with you.
And then when I started to think about doing serious research,
I was confronted with the with the fact that that not all books I was interested in were printed.
And some of them had survived, but they were in manuscript form.
And that was the first time when I started to think, well, isn't that strange that some books are printed in, some books are not printed.
And and then getting I mean,
I became fascinated with the world of manuscripts and manuscript libraries and the kind of the the books that I found
there were different from the books I was used to like in kind of bookshops and on libraries that I printed material.
So there were in terms of numbers, the kind of classical works were much fewer than the more recent works and.
Right. So I did. I saw that these were not the same type of things.
They didn't have the same type of books. And in fact,
some of the books that I had read them that were familiar to me from from all kind of every kind of bookshop I've been to in the Middle East.
I just couldn't find any copies. There was maybe one copy somewhere.
And so that idea of how strange is it that that seems that there's only one manuscript surviving and now we have these copies everywhere.
And everybody seems to be like, oh, yes, everybody talks about love. So, you know, about even husbands talking Hammamet, but only one manuscript.
And that happens to be in Holland. Like what? That's a strange story.
And so over time, I mean, I did you know, as you mentioned, my first book was in the 9th century.
And I, I, I started to get the strange feeling that that, you know, I was trying to both access printed material and manuscripts,
but I felt that that much of our perception had been shaped by people who had
edited works and that rather than just seeing directly into the ninth century,
we were seeing the ninth century through some sort of filter that we weren't really familiar or that we weren't aware of.
And while some of these books were edited by by Western Orientalist, I mean, especially in the field of Islamic law.
That depends from from field to field sometimes, but especially for Islamic law, as basically all editors in the Middle East.
And really, I didn't know any of them. And so I started to think about them and read about them and kind of pay attention to them.
And so that's. So it wasn't interested. That kind of grew while I was a grad student.
And then I started really sitting down and writing in 2014.
But I had already collected quite a bit of material, you know, in libraries.
I did research in Egypt and Syria and Turkey, in various European libraries and and in American libraries.
And I tried to kind of yeah, you do have these sort of interesting you open with this beautiful anecdote of, you know,
finding this manuscript of and you kind of mis translate the title in manuscript as well because you think the mother,
you know, of Shefi or something along those lines.
And it's of course, Jeffy's, um, I can't remember Shaffi wasn't mentioned in the original title, and that's why I think he made the mistake.
But it's clear that you said I think at the end of that story that I knew that I would one day write this book.
So this has been in your mind since your doctorate days, basically. And it's really wonderful test of I.
I love the way in which you weaved that sort of personal anecdote and the personal story into something which is actually quite the point
that you've just made in terms of our academic perception of the field of Islamic studies as a field is shaped by this unconscious bias.
These are sort of fashionable term right now that I think you've done a wonderful job sort of informing us about.
And I look forward to going into that conversation in greater detail as we as we proceed.
If it's okay. I'm going to sort of go ahead and pick a point from your first chapter where you discuss the way in which the
voracious appetite of European scholars for manuscripts from the Middle East in recent centuries innocent.
Almost unwittingly contributed to the decline of Middle Eastern libraries,
and you kind of signal sometimes that practises were quite unscrupulous as well.
So this was a fascinating dimension for me.
A centuries long tradition of orientalism in a pre-set, saidon sense that seems to have been, you know, previously largely unknown.
I wonder if you want to comment on this sort of briefly.
I mean, on the one hand, there is, you know, in recent years that there have been studies done on museums and the collections of museums and,
you know, countless jokes about the British Museum and what it contains and where it's from, etc.
But. But for manuscripts that I feel that there's still a lot to be done.
In fact, it's almost there's been almost nothing that I could draw on about the idea of where do these things come from.
And when you look at actual accounts by Orientalists who travelled the Middle East in the 19th century, particularly about even 20th century,
that they removed manuscripts from endowed libraries where they knew that there were there were not these were right endowed libraries,
whether these managements were not for sale. And they sometimes did it, you know, by outright theft, sometimes by bribery, very often.
They there were also laws in effect that you were not allowed to export these manuscripts.
There was an also another layer of kind of of illegality involved in the procurement of these of these manuscripts.
But on the other, you also signal to forgive me,
also signal that sometimes the sort of the the institutional weakness of these endowments lent themselves to those who are.
But the supposed caretakers were in such penury themselves that they would,
in a sense, resort to selling manuscripts in order to eke out an existence as well.
Sure. In that sense, it was it was a kind of a perfect storm that you have a period in which you have,
on the one hand, this explosion of European curiosity.
And it's important to keep in mind that it was a different career curiosity than you would have today.
I mean, at that point, you know, an early 19th century, people were still looking for the wisdom from the east.
I mean, they were looking for information about astronomy or the sciences, whatever, to discover new stuff, cutting edge stuff.
But, you know, you you had the institutions of of of Islamic book, book culture, libraries,
et cetera, that that work that were built on a system of endowments and and particular.
I mean, I know my book is primarily about the Arab Middle East. Right.
These endowments were in in bad shape at this at this at this time period.
These Arab countries were provinces of of kind of non Arab empires.
And while the endowed libraries in Istanbul, for example, or whether or maybe it is Farhan or in Delhi or something, we're in a better state.
The ones in the Arab Middle East were in a much worse state.
And so you had on the what you had these these libraries in Europe that that were that were funded very well, that had very wealthy donors,
that had well, you know, what were the states themselves when investing heavily in individuals that they had money?
And then you had these institutions where, you know, the endowment that had been found at 200,
300 years earlier, the librarians wages hadn't had kept up with inflation.
There were still two years ago from three years ago from the white Korea.
And that that led to two to kind of rampant kind of selling out of manuscripts.
And it was part of the kind of formation of modern states,
modern nation states in the in the mid of mid 19th century that you have these new libraries founded.
David Cuttable embassy in Cairo, the Viada a library, and in Damascus, where they said, well, look, we have to kind of break this endowment,
endowed libraries and put them together and have them centrally stored and have
librarians that are paid by by the government to make sure that doesn't happen anymore.
Right. That's that's a fascinating key aspect of this,
which I hadn't thought about quite so much in the sense that this is a the modern state is actually, in a sense,
been instrumental now in presenting these sort of manuscript libraries in recent decades, perhaps, and for over a century or so and certain countries.
And yes, I mean, that's that's a transformation, which is also, in some respects,
a sort of ideological shift away from the endowment to the modern state, so to speak.
Which is which is a fascinating way to think about this.
But your comment about sort of, in a sense, the Arab world becoming a provincial region within a larger empire with the with the Ottoman,
whether the multiple empires is interesting because it leads onto another question that I had seen,
which was about the way in which in various parts of the what you allude to scholars from other parts of the Islamic world.
You mentioned Mauritania, Iraq in the case and whatever else OBD.
I believe he had Iraqi heritage, but he's actually born in India as well. So the great polymath of the 18th century.
And while most of your work does focus on Egypt and central Islamic lands of Egypt,
to a certain extent with people like John Kasmi and others, Syria as well, or Shahn,
I wonder to what extent you think that the observations that you make about sort of persse classical
book culture and I'm using a term that you use here can be extended beyond the Egyptian context.
If we were to think about some of these other sort of areas. Yeah.
So I think it's important that, you know,
my faith the majority of my book focuses on Egypt as a stage at which print begins in the Arab world and in which it is,
you know, it reaches the highest volume interplay.
So it wetware wet begins as a part, part and parcel of the kind of modernising state venture of Mohammed Ali.
But also, there has a a liberal kind of press law, which makes it the place where people just come and print books.
And so it's it's a stage for people from from everywhere.
I mean, that's that's East Africans from from Zanzibar who print stuff in Egypt and round people from Somalia and people from,
of course, Syria, Iraq and North Africa. I mean, there's European Orientalists print stuff in Cairo.
That's India. Right. And so on and so on. So it's it's not it's not like some sort of nationalist Egyptian history, of course.
And you make it clear to Egypt as as a stage. Yet.
But for the kind of preprint culture, I, I wanted to.
I mean, there are certain universal aspects of this. You know, what would I called post classical scholarship.
And really the reason why I call it post classical, I think it's apt to call it post classical.
Is that the classical material just isn't particularly interested anymore.
Interesting anymore. For most scoring it kind of right. It's not a you know, the way that I mean that that kind of work.
You speak of how Ashie, for example. Yeah. There's this culture of, you know,
secondary commentaries and tertiary commentaries and even quaternary commentary since it were so that Scholastic's I mean,
I call this phenomenon scholasticism, which obviously analogy to to to European in mediaeval history.
Right. A history of of of commentary's, a history, that kind of intellectual worldview in which more or less everything that is known is known.
Right. Things can be explained, can be analysed in new ways and in interesting ways, formulated in interesting new ways.
But kind of we would kind of know the boundaries of what is no known, no knowledge knowable.
And we we have a limited kind of clusters of texts and commentaries on those texts that we consider.
Right. Right. And. And for that.
And so there's a certain traditionalism in it that that, you know,
we kind of we consider that that certain what's bequeathed to us is what really matters.
And also that that we don't really venture out and look for books that might have been forgotten or that
might find out of a tradition that like that there must be a reason why it fell out of the tradition.
Right. You give this fascinating sort of anecdote. I think it's useful.
Another who says something along the lines of you shouldn't publish it in 10 years works because they've been, you know, discarded for a reason.
The tradition has recognised that they don't really deserve. I mean, I think it was in the band.
Yes. Yes, that's correct. And then, of course, al-Alusi retorts and say, you know.
Right. If you take that logic, Shaffer's work is almost gone.
But all this kind of lewd poetry and whatever, you have hundreds of copies.
So that's really what that's what we should should read and study.
There's a certain kind of a problem with with tradition and that that comes up and that becomes exacerbated through print that you start questioning,
you know, mathematics of cultures have a specific logic wet.
Each copy has to be copied by hand. And so.
So you like the works that have lots of copies.
That has a certain kind of that has a certain.
That shows something. It shows that these words are used. That they're stargaze.
That you ask people to study. They've been accepted. You know, this is very often a kind of phrase that's used, you know.
This is this is accepted or this is, you know, looking at Kabul, you know, sometimes they say that sort of thing.
Yes. And then but then the question of of what if what if the tradition.
I mean, what if the if tradition itself isn't a thing with its own mind.
You know what? There are books that are really valuable, but I've just been forgotten for whatever reason that might be useful to read and write.
And part of this commentary culture is also that there's this lovely, lovely anecdote that that really brought it home for me.
Have seen in his autobiography a life where they get taught, they get taught poetry.
And his his brother, his friends, they run off to the bookshop to look for commentaries like poetry.
And he said, that's not how I look like he's the blind kid sitting there.
Like, that's not how you read poetry. I mean, you read the poetry and that kind of idea that there's a there's a fear of I might misunderstand,
like, what is the correct understanding of this tack. Right.
Like, I don't have any like a framework, a tradition that explains it, Raymie, that there's a fear of kind of deviance that comes in.
If you take texts that are these these often texts. Right.
And which are not transmitted, you know, with with snow and things like this.
But kind of that that specific context of of of modernity, of challenges off of Western political domination,
but also this the knowledge and the power that comes with it, that it attracts people to kind of kind of discovering things in their own tradition.
They don't actually fall out of the tradition that that's that was for me.
I mean, if I had to say what the contribution the main contribution of our book is,
is that I feel that a lot of modern scholars of modern Islamic thought or modern Islamic history,
for them there is kind of modern stuff,
I don't know people translating Voltaire into Arabic and whatever and doing whatever the modern stuff is or that old stuff.
But to think that there is amongst this old stuff,
there's actually there's actually a way of of discovering really old classical works that was a revolutionary modernising strategy.
Right. Right. And that we don't see anymore today because we've taken them to be not normal and natural.
Oh, I'm sure everybody must have known all these classics, which in fact, is not the case,
that there was for me that the grand really the great grand discovery that in a sense, the epiphany of the book.
Yes. I mean. And that funny as well. I mean, in a sense, it just suddenly changes the way you see it, the entire tradition.
Although, I mean,
maybe I can sort of mention another very encyclopaedic scholar of our own time is the Mauritanian scholar Mohammed Alhassan with the other.
And he I remember listening to a lecture of his once where he basically described the tradition.
I can't remember the exact Arabic word he used to describe it, but he basically says, you know, something along the lines of.
Animal. I won't let allow anyone to tell us and allow us.
And the knowledge that people need is sometimes sort of concealed and then revealed just by the vicissitudes of history.
He suggested, for example, that he must know the book even misled,
which is this enormous, you know, considered to be the largest, must never be compiled.
Basically, it's completely disappeared or, you know, perhaps there are certain citations here and there.
And then in later centuries, perhaps someone rediscovers a just or a, you know, a selection of readings of a hadith or.
And that can actually provide a kind of you know, from his perspective,
working within the Islamic tradition, in a sense, provide means of accessing knowledge that was once lost.
But that is now needed in this time. And in a sense, it's God unveiling something not in it and not in a cursory sense.
Leave it. And so, you know, there is that kind of sense, even amongst a scholar, you know,
working within the tradition of that contingency of what we have access to, which, you know, you don't you don't hear it very often.
But I think it's great to sort of put that front and centre in it in a book like yours.
I think it's very helpful in many respects. Yeah, I did.
I didn't want to. To kind of give the impression that there was like 300 years in which nobody thought about classical works.
Right. But but I mean, even I you know, I made the experience myself to lock lockdown now that if the library isn't accessible anymore,
there's just there's just practical things that you just can't go and just take all the stuff down.
And I work with it and. Right. And if you have even just practical decline off of availability of work.
Right. It has an effect on what your scholarship is. What what your what your scholarship includes.
Right. You know, if if your own scholarship doesn't include these works and the next generation,
as the next nation always does, is like, what do I need to learn? What do I need to know to be educated?
All right. You know, I need to know those specific commentaries. I don't need to know all the old stuff, you know.
That's right. Right, right. Right. You know, maybe there's a few opinions by Tabari that we need to memorise or that we need.
Right. Fourth hand. Right. We don't we need to read that whole thing anyway.
Doesn't exist probably anymore. I mean, somebody like Mortada Zebedee who was who was travelling all over the place.
Right. And who clearly had enormous memory and was able to too.
I don't know. I mean, some people have that ability to write, kind of take all these pieces of information, put them together.
But it's it's very tiring to do. I mean, even today, you know, doing my research, sometimes I hadn't a problem that, you know,
you are in the Middle East and you have you're looking at manuscripts, but you don't have a good secondary library.
And then you go back to your Western institution that has a good scholarly library.
It doesn't have the mountains, you guys on only trips. That is difficult. Today, you can and have so much digital digital access.
But but to think about the things, the premodern period.
I mean, even if there have been I mean, even for those who who had an interest, it was it became real difficult.
I mean, I think in in so many respects, this idea of, you know, Estie and so to speak,
like having that capriciousness that I think is like, what does A, B, the oil payment Karani, some of these sort of PostgreSQL figures,
but who in essence, you sort of suggest exemplify this encyclopaedic learning or an attempt to maintain that sort of standard,
even through a culture which in a sense doesn't quite value that anymore?
You know, I think I think that's illustrative.
And I think you you do signal this, including a remark in your conclusion that a little in a moment that the time isn't a uniform time.
It's not sort of like, yes,
there are certain themes that you consider to be present as deserving the label of scholasticism and post classical book culture.
But there are these kind of fascinating figures.
And in a sense, your homing in on some of these fascinating figures, particularly the latest stage when they are the people who honour these texts.
I wanted to sort of talk a little bit about, you know,
this this point that you make between this kind of you could say almost an Orientalist
narrative in the pejorative sense of decline vs. the attempt by a lot of scholars,
you know, of our generation. And, you know, I think the previous generation now who are basically trying to push back against those sorts of problems.
And so, you know, in your conclusion,
you actually are very careful to highlight that there's a kind of unfortunate but largely superficial alignment of your narrative
with the so-called intellectual decline narrative against which many of these scholars have been pushing for some time now.
And, you know, I thought that your conclusion quite sort of carefully balanced the desire
between trying to avoid reinforcing the transcendent triumphalism to the kind
of Eurocentric scholarship while recognising that there were indigenous voices of reform that existed that recognised serious deficiencies in what,
you know, you've called classical culture. And I wonder I mean, this is a question that I grapple with just an extent.
How do you balance this sort of desire in this literature?
Or how do you strike the right balance between trying to correct for issues of Eurocentrism,
which I think you are quite conscious of throughout your work, but also correcting for the overcorrection, so to speak.
So how how what would you say to someone like myself?
I mean, on the one hand, I think it's it's always helpful to be really precise and that that the enemy of I mean,
that the antidote to stereotypes and generalisations shouldn't be just the opposite, the generalisation of stereotype, but it should be precision.
And so, you know, if if you take a word like decline.
Right. That can you know that that. There are things that that you can quantify and where there is a decline.
I mean, like that the the the number of books in libraries in Cairo over the number of
working madrassas in Cairo declined from the 16th century to the 19th century.
I mean, it's just numbers. You can just see a number, lower number.
And similarly, you can look at American whatever American economic dominance are not in 1945 and today.
And you can see a decline. Clearly, there is a decline of it produced 50 percent of all goods in the world and 45.
Right. Today it does. I don't know how many. Seven percent. That's right.
But but the I think the problem of the narrative of decline is that nothing happened.
Nothing worth thinking about or nothing of any kind of happened that I think
that we don't we don't use that for the United States or for Great Britain,
which declined. Right. Right. But but we use it for kind of post classical Middle East.
Right. Which it's like it's not like that. There were just, you know, smoking opium pipes lying on a couch.
Right. Right. So. So it does not you know, you can't take a look.
Yeah. To kind of re-establishes. Oh, well, we don't have to. We don't have to talk about that period.
Right. Right. But at the same time there is that there are there's a kind of knee jerk generalisation of saying,
oh look, no, here I give you a list of books that were written in this time period.
So it was a it was flourishing.
If you're not looking at what the books are about or if you say, oh, look, they will look at they were studying these rational sciences.
Look here. There's all these citations.
Mark Masters of the rational sciences without saying, OK, what were is it interesting that in this time period,
esoteric sciences were were categorised as rational sciences.
So animal Hotovely was considered to be a rational science. I mean, that's just an important kind of thing to put out there.
But then there's another that there's a slightly different but also kind of current way of thinking about it,
which is saying things like the state is bad, more kind of iron, cage of rationality is bad.
But the Middle East didn't have that. So it becomes like the opposite of the West.
But in the positive, in a positive way. So they didn't actually they they didn't have whatever they had all these ecstatic ways of knowing.
So look how how this is solving the problems of the current West.
And so I think, you know, for me, it's it's important to to understand history is not in a kind of melodramatic sense of it's either.
It was good of it's bad. Right. Right. But actually, what was at stake, you know, what did it mean to to be an intellect, you know,
to be an educated person in the 17th century as compared to the 10th century as compared to the 20th century.
And we accept this in European intellectual history in the early 20th century, you know,
like physics on the atom level or quantum physics like that was the thing where all these young geniuses flock flock to.
And then in the later parts, you have DNA.
Is that becomes biology or, you know, not computer science or something like the rest is these moments that chain is not like,
oh, you know, Muslims love books, look like a jahad loved books.
That's true. Right. Right. But, you know, you have very different stories told in the 18th century, for example, in the 17th century.
So it's important to keep you know, that there is a history.
It's not just all the just the previous the premodern Muslim world, that it's just like one arena that's changing.
There's a history there. And I think precision is is the the antidote to too lazy generalisations either way.
Right. I think I mean, this is it's something which I think scholars in our field will have to grapple with for a very good period of time,
because so much of our field is still, in a sense, trying to correct for, you know,
issues that existed in 19th century scholarship and early 20th century scholarship.
A lot of which we're building on. And we benefited a great deal from some of the great scholars of those periods.
But they also brought a lot of, you know, we could say ideological baggage.
And I think there is there is an increasing consciousness, however, I mean, in our own time that and sometimes I think it can become as I say,
it's an overcorrection that the suggestion that ideology is inescapable on some level
and that there needs to be position in scholarship as well as a consciousness.
I think of that element. And, you know, I think that the your book does a wonderful job.
And I think laying down and documenting and giving facts and figures and presenting a compelling history.
I apologise. You might hear my son in the background. Yes, he's.
He's a wonderful sort of delight to have around and sometimes sort of drops into these sorts of sessions, but is always welcome.
And so so I think that, you know, this is something that scholars will continue to sort of struggle with in some respects.
But I think you've painted us a very persuasive picture of how it could be done in a way that maintains a sort of a fealty to an empiricist dimension,
as well as a recognition of the way in which indigenous sort of actors viewed their own activities.
And I think sometimes when ideology or concerns about it can suppress almost the voices of indigenous actors,
that's something that we all need to be conscious about.
And it's something that we need to be careful and thoughtful about.
So I'm just wondering if you've got a little more time, so to speak.
And I I am tempted to sort of because I jumped to actually the last of the questions and this sort of dialogue section, I.
I wonder if you would like to talk a little bit about Evan Tamia or if you'd like to.
Okay, sir. So in a sense, the sort of the last question that I have is about a figure who is in many respects
quite controversial in our own time and was a bit of a controversialist in his own time,
to be fair.
But in Chapter seven, you discuss the mom look polymath, even Tamia as a scholar who emerges, as you put it, as a model of broad erudition.
Now, you argue that his reputation as an extremist and you are not alone in this, but his reputation as an extremist in recent decades is undeserved.
But you also point out how he had been neglected by post classical culture.
And just for clarity, you kind of designate post classical culture as being from the 16th to 19th centuries, roughly.
And I'm curious to know why the reformists you studied and used the term reformist in a descriptive.
They were in an effort very self-conscious to reform sort of their societies and the educational cultures.
Why these reformists singled out in Thamir as a model of broad intellectual sort of erudition,
given the considerable roster of polymaths found throughout Islamic history?
What do you think was for then special about him, Thania?
I think there are there are various elements of his office, his work, of his character, of his.
The features of of his writing that that were particularly attractive to these reformers.
The first one is something that I already kind of hinted at a little bit earlier, is that in his writing,
you don't get the feeling that there is this amorphous tradition in the sense that I think so.
These modernist reformers, one of their their main challenge was this idea that there is there is this one thing called Islam,
which is identical to to the kind of a kind of an amorphous tradition which you can either take or you can leave.
Right. And it's it's. It consists of various various parts.
And. And so the question of how do you step out of out of it?
I mean, how do you avoid this this this weight of tradition?
How do you step out of it, critique parts of it, selecting without becoming, you know, with,
you know, without having to, for example, just become a convert to West Western rationalism?
Or what would the Western intellectual fashions of the day and what what what in Timir
showed is that he was himself somebody who who is difficult to categorise human.
Right, who do who doesn't? I mean, who is himself doing this kind of work to the orthodoxy of his own day.
Right. And who does this with his cards on the table in the sense that, you know, when you read the tale as early.
Right. You know, it is a super intelligent person, but he doesn't tell you who he's read, who has who he has read.
I mean, hardly ever does he mentioned that or who he. He cites something he cited and he did not actually cite it like he's kind of played.
I mean, he loves modern day cleaning lady, slightly difficult level macchi, for example, in Lamborghini.
He takes sections from it, doesn't mention it. So it's because one thing on the other hand.
I saw a study that somebody did just looking at the much more photograph of him and tell me it.
So it's just one large work, but it's just not all of the work.
And he cites 500 works in in in this in this collection explicitly who the person is citing from what?
Whatever. And so he kind of he paints for you not this amorphous tradition, but, you know, the various forms and how they relate to each other.
And isn't that the groups that have died out that he's read?
Because he's I mean, he has read so much that that's part of issues that he has read.
And and so in a sense, he's or he can also be a guide for you into the tradition.
So, Zebedee, he basically reproduces in 10 years at Murphy superlatively years because, you know, Temi talks about Martez a lot to see or whatever.
Like that doesn't rightest anymore. Like, right. You have somebody who can give you a tour of this.
And so. And you know that that there is there is part, of course, like the kind of historical method, philological method.
You know, Abraham, you're already criticise us for a couple of the historic historicity off of al-Hassani
Hussein Mosque in Cairo that documents claimed that they had buried there.
The head of Alfalfa's then. Right. And Tim, you're just like has it just a normal historical criticism?
Right. Well, I mean, there is no evidence that this is the head of Hussein.
And, you know, people say that there is there.
So it's a it's it's a it's something that you can you can take up in the 20th and the 19th century or early 20th century.
Tell me what's really we're only starting to be published in nineteen hundred. Right.
Radically late, but it's it's something that can stand in its own mythological ways and that is kind of actually theologically rigorous in that sense.
Right. And so that for different groups he can serve as as as a model in different ways.
It's not just one specific way. Or if you're particularly if you're politically objecting to, let's say, shrine culture,
which which was a kind of basically universal concern of reformists today, of course.
We consider that primarily like a concern of hard core kind of jihadis who who want to destroy those those those shrines.
But it was generally an issue of of kind of modernisers are saying, look, this this is what is this?
You know, people make these as Quakers. I higher figures that have control over the weather and the harvest.
Right. My fertility of women and this kind of thing. People were embarrassed about this.
It shows the sorts of harassment for many people. So so I said, OK.
We actually have an indigenous scholar who. Who are already in the 14th century criticises this.
So there is he has something for for a wide range of reformists.
So this is really interesting about what you mentioned about trying culture as well.
I know I'm not familiar with sort of sexy literature specifically on this.
One thinks of both for work, which is more about mediæval, Kyra. But, you know, it's fascinating that you also used the term embarrassed.
You know, people are starting to become embarrassed about this sort of thing. And, you know,
I'm reminded that even someone like Mohammed Zettl Ghostery Jonathan Brown talks about this
in his discussion on week hadiths that even Mohammed Zettl coteries begins to recognise.
Actually, there are certain types of HEDIS.
We should point out as weak because they are an embarrassment considering sort of modern sensibilities and so on.
But, you know, at the same time, I suspect that, you know, that sort of shrine culture would have, in a sense,
the in the way that you describe this classical culture kind of burgeoned in that
period in a way that might not have existed on such a widespread scale before.
And, you know, it would be wonderful if sort of a scholar were to actually it's a lot to trace through the literature,
but to actually do what we can to sort of illustrate that that was, in fact, the case.
But it does seem to be suggested, by the way, in which you say terrorism becomes quite important.
I think in the way that you portrayed this, and it does seem you present a very compelling narrative.
That's what I can say. And we'll be definitely sort of grappling with this for very long to come.
And, you know, I can only thank you for sort of working on this book.
And as we come to a close, I just want to sort of let everyone know that I've been speaking to the author, Ahmed H.M.S.,
about his recent book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.